James Knight : part four

What other poetry books have you been reading lately?

I read a lot of contemporary poetry, and have been binge-reading Aase Berg recently (in Johannes Göransson’s translations). I discovered her work only a couple of months ago, and it has been a revelation. Her poems are surrealistic in their construction, juxtaposing unstable blocks of meaning and imagery in ever-shifting patterns, and there is an exciting ungainliness about clauses and sentences, a sort of violence on a grammatical level. There is such an abundance of good, well-written, polished poetry out there, poetry that feels too “right” to the reader, poetry that has perhaps been sanitised and rendered toothless. Berg’s poetry is the opposite: she does not give the reader the smooth ride of the perfectly-turned phrase. Instead, we are constantly challenged by poetry that demands to be read on its own terms, not ours. And she deals with big topics: nature and nurture; the complex relationship between words and things; the intractability of language; what it is to be human.